Having and Being Had

by Eula Biss

In the furniture stores we visit, I’m filled with a strange unspecific desire. I want everything and nothing. The soft colors of the rugs, the warm wood grains, the brass and glass of the lamps all seem to suggest that the stores are filled with beautiful things, but when I look at any one thing I don’t find it beautiful.

A woman went slumming, Alison Light writes, to find herself “beyond the narrow confines of her well-upholstered world.”

Nobody understands privilege as well as those who don’t have it.

I obsess, which solves nothing.

“One of the main things Marx noticed about capitalism,” she writes, “is that it really encourages people to have relationships with things instead of with other people.”

It costs $200, twice as much as my wedding ring. But I go ahead and buy it. This gives me a strange sense of accomplishment that persists through dinner. On the train home I’m still too tired to read, but I feel like I’ve done something today. Or the necklace has done it for me.

In its earliest usage, consumption always implied destruction.

What is destroyed when we think of ourselves as consumers, Graeber suggests, is the possibility that we might be doing something productive outside of work.

The money in our savings account was not money, in my mind, it was time.

After a pause, Bill admits that he doesn’t really know what capitalism is. In trying to explain it, I realize that I don’t know either. And I don’t know where capitalism began, or when. We agree that we will find out what capitalism is before we talk again.

Not having money is time consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company or the phone company over some fee, some little charge, some mistake.

My adult life, I decide, can be divided into two distinct parts—the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after. I consider the possibility that the washing machine, more than the house, has changed my life. I call my sister and tell her that what I’ve really done is buy a $400,000 container for a washing machine.

Nearly all people in nearly all nations, for nearly all of human history, he observes, have been poor. Widespread poverty is not an anomaly. But widespread affluence is. And if we meet this new affluence with old ideas forged in poverty, we will misunderstand ourselves.

“Judging wealthy people on the basis of their individual behaviors—do they work hard enough, do they consume reasonably enough, do they give back enough—distracts us from other kinds of questions about the morality of vastly unequal distributions of wealth,” she writes. We shouldn’t ask our rich to be good, in other words, we should ask our economic system to be better.

Others were offended—not because a considerable number of people who had been enslaved were still alive and could testify that slavery was not like marriage, but because she was suggesting that marriage, like slavery, was an economic institution.

I wonder what it means, I tell Dan, that the technical terms used to describe markets are “rational” and “irrational.” It sounds like economists are debating, in sexist language, whether markets are logical men or volatile women.

Class is like race in this way, John says, it’s written on your body. But I can’t see it, so I don’t know how to read it.

This chart doesn’t look as much like a waterway now as it does a machine. It’s a series of conveyor belts carrying children, sorting them, then sending them up or down. And it looks like it’s designed to make those girls fall.

These charts track only income, not other dimensions of class. And they don’t illustrate, because this isn’t in the data, what the children carry with them as they rise or fall. There’s no measure of how they’re marked by their background, in the way they talk or what they value or how they think about money and risk and security. And there’s no evidence, once they’ve arrived at a new income, of who they believe themselves to be.

Credit is a form of optimism, Yuval Noah Harari suggests. It depends on the belief that the future will be more prosperous than the present. I kept the silverware because I couldn’t tell the difference between credit and wealth. If I had a better eye for class, I would have seen that I was surrounded by people subsisting on credit, living precariously and passing as middle class. Credit creates the illusion of equality, in that we can all buy the same things on credit, but we can’t all pay the debt back.

It was a votive candle meant to bring abundance into our lives. How much more abundance, I wondered, could we absorb?

So, she says, is this what we do now? We just keep earning money and replacing this stuff with better stuff?

Leisure is how a class that doesn’t have to work displays its status.

She doesn’t know if my letter arrived because she doesn’t want her neighbors to see her walking out to the mailbox at noon, which is when the mail is delivered. Her neighbors have a protestant work ethic and nine-to-five lives. She’ll have to wait until five to check the mail, she laughs. She’s on sabbatical, writing a book. But her neighbors don’t know this. She doesn’t want them to think she isn’t working.

Capitalism couldn’t really take hold, Weber noted, until people became convinced, one way or another, to make more money than they needed.

The protestant ethic describes the moralizing of work and the privileging of property, not, as I used to think, the belief that work is, in and of itself, good.

The social cost of some things is their very cheapness.

I was intrigued, as a child, that a bottle could also be a woman. She had a job, this woman, holding syrup. But when it was all poured out, when she was empty and her job was done, she became something else.

Work, Lewis Hyde writes, is distinct from labor. Work is something we do by the hour, and labor sets its own pace. Work, if we are fortunate, is rewarded with money, but the reward for labor is transformation. “Writing a poem,” Hyde writes, “raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms—these are labors.” This list reveals to me my problem. I want to give my life to labor, not work.

The rich of the city wanted to believe that the poor made them unsafe, not the other way around.

I’m intrigued by his collection, so precarious, requiring constant maintenance, and worth nothing. It produces no appreciation in value, just practice.

At first, I don’t understand why it’s news that a man who has a woman doing all his housework is finding himself productive. But then I think maybe this is progress. Maybe what’s news is that now we’re calling this domination, when we used to just call it marriage.

Paying another woman is just outsourcing the oppression, she tells me.

I have discovered that consenting to small amounts of pain and abuse and suffering is like an inoculation of my soul against the pandemic of hatred.”

The idea that unions are for people in bad jobs and that people in good jobs don’t need to negotiate the terms of their service depends on the belief that good jobs are inherently good and can’t be made bad, or more menial.

Without changing jobs, without joining a union, the janitors improved their work life by caring for people. Part of what makes a job good, they understood, is the sense that what you do matters.

The pleasure of splitting a log, I know, is not unlike the pleasure of hitting the right sentence, a sentence that splits open to reveal a meaning that was, just moments ago, trapped in wood.

Maybe the value of art, to artists and everyone else, is that it upends other value systems. Art unmakes the world made by work.

I want to be a class traitor, but I suspect that I’m more attracted to the romance of treason than the reality.

Smith left Russia for Ethiopia and renounced his Soviet citizenship, but he was never allowed to reclaim his US citizenship. He became a stateless person. Or he had always been a stateless person, in possession of a precarious citizenship, as conditional and prone to repeal as ever. He was an American, but he had no country. “The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can’t betray a country you don’t have,” James Baldwin writes. You can’t be a traitor if you’ve never been a citizen.

Maybe from inside capitalism, Will says, every other system looks improbable and nostalgic, and every other way of life is hard to believe.

“Don’t you know that ‘No’ is the wildest word we consign to Language?”

5) Never forget that work is the story we tell ourselves about money.

Initially, I only allowed myself to read articles and books given to me or suggested by friends. This rule enhanced my awareness of how my friends extend and limit what I know and understand. It also offered an opportunity for me to think about the intersection between my social capital and my cultural capital. One is tied to the other—I would not know who I know without what I know, and I could not know what I know without who I know—and both are tied to economic capital. Many of my friends belong to my economic class and are situated as I am within the values and assumptions and blindnesses of that class.